A picture says more than a thousand cookies

Why being surrounded by candy and fatty food may be healthier for you in the long run than just looking at a picture of a cake.

By Vinh Prag

On billboards, in shop windows, on taxis, on bus stops, in the buses and subways, even on people’s clothes – ads are everywhere, and many of them tempt you with pictures of food that you really don’t need, like candy, junk food and cakes.

But as long as the pictures of colourful lollipops or melting chocolate chip cookies are only pictures, they can’t harm you. Or can they?

A recent study by scientists at the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium, suggests that seeing pictures of tempting foods may be even worse for you than having the food standing right in front of you.

Surprised? So was Kelly Geyskens, one of the study authors.

“At first I thought I’d made a mistake,” she says.

Tests of temptation

The experiments that Geyskens and her colleagues performed involved hundreds of female undergrad students and several kinds of chocolate.

“Women are always used in research concerning food intake and self-control,” Geyskens explains, “Females show more restraint than men concerning food intake regulation.”

The researchers divided all the women into groups of eight and subjected each group to a different course of action.

Some would be asked to look at pictures and match colours of candy wrappers to the tastes inside, some did other tasks while bowls of candy sat there with a note saying that they were for later use.

All the experiments would end up with an opportunity to eat as many M&Ms as they wanted, and at the end, the researchers weighed how many M&Ms the women would each have eaten.

“We wanted to test how exposure to pictures of food as opposed to real food would activate their eating goals,” says Geyskens.

In this experiment, the scientists differed between short-term and long-term eating goals. Short-term goals are characterised by immediate satisfaction like a good taste or satisfying a craving, whereas long-term goals could be eating well and staying fit and healthy.

“What our study showed,” Geyskens explains, “Was that the subjects that had seen pictures of chocolate during the experiments, activated their immediate eating goals, and they ate more M&Ms in the end than the subjects who had real candy around them during the experiments.”

Fool me once

Suresh Ramanathan is a professor of Marketing at the University of Chicago. He has done similar research on the topic of food temptation and is not surprised by the Belgian findings.

Ramanathan’s own research has focused on how the memory of how you acted the last time you were tempted by the same kind of food affects the way you react now.

“What we’re really looking at here is a dynamic built-in reaction,” he explains, “Every decision is not in a vacuum, but it’s a kind of choice process. When you see something delicious right in front of you, you remember the last time you succumbed to the same temptation. When you feel you have succumbed once, you feel that you should resist it this time.”

So what’s going on in our brains when seeing pictures of chocolate makes us eat more candy afterwards?

The idea is that your brain has some self-control mechanisms that are triggered when you’re tempted. But the Belgian study suggests that the mechanisms are not activated when it’s a temptation you can’t act on right away – a so-called non-actionable food temptation – like an ad in a magazine for a chocolate bar.

Kelly Geyskens believes that the results of the study imply that when you’re on a diet, it may not be the best approach to purge your refrigerator of chocolaty treats:

“You punish food temptations around you, but maybe it’s not the best way,” she says, “Because when you’re facing a conflict, you have to deal with it. You’re in a self-control conflict, because you want to eat it, but you know you shouldn’t.”

And that’s when the brain’s self-control mechanism steps in.

I scream, you scream

In one workplace in Burlington, Vermont, temptation and self-control is a part of the daily routine.

Dustin Spence is in his early twenties and has worked at the original Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory for two years. He has just finished showing a group of tourists around the factory and making cow jokes that he obviously doesn’t think are funny (“Now you’re going to watch a moo-vie”).

At the end of the tour, the visitors have had a taste of a new raspberry ice cream that is not yet on the market. Before the next tour starts, he has to scoop ice cream into a tray full of little sample cups.

His job consists mostly of showing tourists around, scooping samples and parking cars in the summer. But like all employees at Ben & Jerry’s, he has perks.

“We have an employee break room and an employee freezer in there that’s always stocked with pints of ice cream,” Spence explains, “And we’re all allowed to take home three pints of ice cream for every day that we work here.”

Dustin Spence and his colleagues are also allowed to eat it at work whenever they want. A dream to many ice cream lovers, you would think. But even when surrounded by tempting pints of Cherry Garcia, Chocolate Fudge Brownie and Chunky Monkey, the colourful pint buckets remain largely untouched.

“I don’t think people eat a lot of ice cream when they’re at work,” says Spence while he meticulously places a scoop of bright red ice cream in a paper sample cup, “I don’t know if you get sick of ice cream, but it becomes less of a temptation because it’s so available.”

Bad ads

Naturally, co-author Kelly Geyskens who is an affiliate researcher at the Department of Marketing and Organization at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, where the study was performed, is very interested in what consequences the results can have for marketing and advertising.

“Of course, for advertising people, it’s a good conclusion,” she says, “The consumers see an ad for candy and they lose their self-control. But you could also flip it around and consider that having food samples in supermarkets might help the consumers exert self-control.”

The study suggests that pictures of candy and other tempting foods that aren’t good for you could be contributing to over-eating, as the brain’s self-control mechanism is not triggered. In other words, food ads may be bad for you.

The Code

Whether this study will have an impact on the advertising business anytime soon, though, is doubtful.

Janet Feasby is the vice president of the ASC, Advertising Standards Canada, an institution that has been upholding the Canadian Code of Advertising Standards – known in the business as simply the Code – since 1963.

Feasby does not see how the results of the Belgian study should affect the Code, even though the Code already has a paragraph on advertising for children that states that ads “must not exploit their credulity […] and must not present […] illustrations that might result in their physical, emotional or moral harm,”

“We can’t comment on a study,” she says, “it would need very hard evidence for this to have an impact on the Code.”

Professor Ramanathan in Chicago says, “All experimental research suffers from this kind of problem. You can’t draw real conclusions or generalize too much. But the findings are intriguing enough and need to be studied more.”

Kelly Geyskens agrees and says that she and her colleagues are planning to do more research on this field.

So for now, it may be safer to just look away when you see a commercial for a chocolate bar on TV. It’s better for you to look at the one sitting in your cupboard.